by Renee Holden, former Head Editor, INALJ Nebraska
previously published 10/15/13

Zombies! They’re Coming for You!

With Halloween just around the corner,  and since zombies have replaced vampires as all the rage, I thought that some of my library’s most popular zombie reads would get everyone in the mood for the walking dead on Halloween.

World War Z by Max Brooks (2006)

An account of the decade-long period when civilization stood on the brink of extinction due to a viral plague that transformed anyone it infected into a ghoulish creature with an appetite for living flesh, as told by the civilians, soldiers and politicians who survived it. 

Working Stiff by Rachel Caine (2011)

Bryn Davis was killed on the job after discovering her bosses were selling a drug designed to resurrect the dead. Now, revived by the same drug, she becomes an undead soldier in a corporate war to take down the very pharmaceutical company responsible for her new condition.

Zombie Blondes by Brian James (2008)

Each time fifteen-year-old Hannah and her out-of-work father move she has some fears about making friends, but a classmate warns her that in Maplecrest, Vermont, the cheerleaders really are monsters.

Cell by Stephen King (2006)

A single pulse is simultaneously transmitted through every cell phone on the planet. After the pulse, an unspeakable transformation occurs. People everywhere begin devolving into inhuman killing machines…and civilization as we know it grinds to a halt in a terrifying riot of violence. It falls to a small group of survivors to turn the tables and take back the streets…or die trying. 

Rot & Ruin by Jonathan Maberry (2011)

In a post-apocalyptic world where fences and border patrols guard the few people left from the zombies that have overtaken civilization, fifteen-year-old Benny Imura is finally convinced that he must follow in his older brother’s footsteps and become a bounty hunter.

Star Wars: Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber (2009)

When the Imperial prison barge Purge (temporary home to five hundred of the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, rebels, scoundrels, and thieves) breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space, its only hope appears to live with a star destroyer found drifting, derelict, and seemingly abandoned. But when a boarding party from the Purge is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back-bringing with them a horrific disease so lethal that within hours nearly all aboard the Purge die in ways too hideous to image. And death is only the beginning.

Alice in Zombieland by Gena Showalter (2012)

Had anyone told Alice Bell that her entire life would change course between one heartbeat and the next, she would have laughed. From blissful to tragic, innocent to ruined? Please. But that’s all it took. One heartbeat. A blink, a breath, a second, and everything she knew and loved was gone.